The FT’s Gillian Tett reports from Davos that the Powers that Be may finally have noticed how — while they were busy regulating the banks — the technology companies quietly moved into what was once their unregulated turf.

Via Wednesday’s Davos dispatch:

Large technology companies will experience the same collapse in reputation as banks have endured in recent years unless they rapidly change their policy approach, business leaders cautioned in Davos. Their warning was directed at the influential heads of technology companies, such as the Silicon Valley giants, who were told they needed to recognise that self-regulation will not be sufficient to stave off mounting public alarm about issues such as privacy.

“Self-regulation, no matter what you do, is just not going to be good enough [for tech companies],” said Paul Achleitner, chairman of the supervisory board of Deutsche Bank. He pointed out that a self-regulatory approach had been previously employed by banks — but notably failed to quell a political backlash against their over-reach.

It takes a bold and courageous man to go against the consensus, especially when the consensus view equals “evil manipulative trader types got what they deserved with that $4.3bn fine for fx rigging!”

In this case that bold man is Matt Levine, columnist at Bloomberg and long-time communicator of logic and sense, who made the brave assertion on Wednesday that commentary surrounding this entire rigging episode may be losing sight of the core fundamentals of the case. Namely, that in terms of money made, there’s no escaping the fact that this was possibly the least successful manipulation attempt of recent times. Read more

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

The Group faces legal, competition and regulatory challenges, many of which are beyond the Group’s control. The extent of the impact on the Group of these matters cannot always be predicted but may materially impact the Group’s results of operations, financial results, condition and prospects…

There’s not much that’s actually new in a base prospectus published by Barclays on Thursday, covering a future $60bn debt programme. But what the document does offer is a compendium of all the litigation and regulatory action the bank faces around the world. Read more

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has today issued two Warning Notice Statements. This is the sixth and seventh time the FCA have issued a Warning Notice Statement since it was given the power to do so by the Financial Services Act 2012. The Government’s principal rationale for giving the FCA this power was to promote early transparency of enforcement proceedings. Read more

Don’t ask a European regulator. Or, if you do, don’t expect an answer any time soon.

We’ve written about the feud between the European Commission and the new-ish fangled ESMA before. Last time it was about the fact that no one seemed to be able to agree what constituted an “alternative investment.” This time it’s over a failure to agree a common definition of what constitutes a “derivative.” Read more

To regulators, naysayers and haters, the hedge fund industry has had one trump card to play for years: hey, we didn’t cause the financial crisis.

Cause the crisis? Maybe not. But a staff report lands from the New York Fed which suggests hedge funds did at least make it worse, adding to disruption in the credit markets that helped to seize up funding for US companies after Lehman Brothers collapsed. Read more

Tracy Alloway used to be deputy editor of FT Alphaville. Here she learned the details of derivatives, the absurdities of accounting and the various structures of ... erm ... structured finance. She now covers big US banks for the FT paper, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. She pops up on FT Alphaville every once in a while.

It is, depending on the week, 75-78 per cent — the amount by which dealer banks’ inventories of corporate bonds are said to have declined since their peak of $235bn in 2007, according to Federal Reserve data. Read more

Received wisdom has it that the implementation of new financial regulation in the wake of the crisis has been held back, or watered down, by furious behind-the-scenes lobbying by the investment industry.

But it’s pretty clear, in Europe at least, that the technocrats, be they in Paris or Brussels, have their own particular ways of making sure that nothing much actually gets done. Read more

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

The Network aims to promote collaboration in international financial matters to help facilitate cost-effective resolution of disputes and avoidance of duplicative and inconsistent adjudication of the same matters in different jurisdictions, thus increasing the likelihood of resolving financial disputes in a way that all market participants will find to be substantively and procedurally fair… Read more

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

As part of a reorganisation of London Stock Exchange Group’s (“LSEG”) Italian legal entities earlier this year, a valuation report was prepared for the specific purposes of the reorganisation and was filed with the Companies Register of the Milan Chamber of Commerce and has recently been made public. This report included a LSEG revenue projection for the year ending 31st March 2016 of €1.4Bn with 12% annual LSEG revenue growth from the start of FY14. It also included 5 year (FY14 to FY18) financial projections for the Italian legal entities together with historic information for such entities for the 9 months to 31 December 2012.

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

They all come from this Stefan Ingves speech given on Thursday — in which the Basel Committee chair addresses “some concerns… that banks are not calculating risk weighted assets” – the denominator in a bank’s regulatory capital ratio – “consistently”.

Basel is about to release results of a probe into banking and trading books… Read more

Lisa joined FT Alphaville in September 2011 after a tour of duty through the guts of the financial industry, having worked as an analyst at a bank and for a financial data company. She's now the Head of New Projects for FT.com and fortnightly columnist for the paper.

On Friday, the FSA has published its feedback and responses to a review of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme funding model issued back in July. It’s long. Lucky for us then that we were looking for one thing and one thing only — the stance on “pre-funding”.

Kate is FT AV’s Asia Correspondent. She joined FT Alphaville in mid-2011 after carrying out various roles in the FT’s London office since 2005: interactive editor, companies reporter, and founding editor of the FT’s Energy Source blog.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has finalised rules for bank liquidity. Some of the changes had been anticipated in recent weeks, particularly after the US banks ramped up their lobbying efforts. That said, they’re still quite a big departure from the 2010 draft rules, especially on what qualifies as a high quality liquid asset.

Lisa joined FT Alphaville in September 2011 after a tour of duty through the guts of the financial industry, having worked as an analyst at a bank and for a financial data company. She's now the Head of New Projects for FT.com and fortnightly columnist for the paper.

“A judgmental structure of supervision that emphasises the big issues has to be matched by proper transparency . . . or it won’t work.” Andrew Bailey, head of prudential regulation at the Financial Services Authority, told that to parliamentarians on Monday.

Too bad there’s seemingly no tradition of transparent supervision in the UK, especially when it comes to banks. Read more

Lisa joined FT Alphaville in September 2011 after a tour of duty through the guts of the financial industry, having worked as an analyst at a bank and for a financial data company. She's now the Head of New Projects for FT.com and fortnightly columnist for the paper.

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

Masa joined the FT in 2009 and has worked on a number of desks across the paper, including Companies, Markets and Comment. She spent much of 2010 in New York covering the US equity markets. But earlier this year she finally saw the light and moved to Alphaville.

She started her career in the investment banking division at Lehman Brothers in the summer of 2007, timing it perfectly with the beginning of the credit crunch.

What do you get when you reveal two new regulatory investigations as part of your slightly disappointing quarterly results? Answer: a 4.4 per cent drop in share price, as Barclays is finding out on Wednesday morning.

Barclays has warned investors that it is facing another fine in the US, this time over its conduct in power trading.

It has also disclosed that it is under investigation by the US Department of Justice and the US Securities and Exchange Commission over whether its relationships with certain third parties breached corruption rules.

Cardiff writes mostly about US macroeconomic issues, with daily excursions into other topics about which he claim no expertise. Before Alphaville, Cardiff spent a little more than two years as a reporter at Dow Jones Financial News covering investment banking, asset management, and private equity. Along the way he has written freelance pieces on a variety of other topics from behavioural psychology to Muay Thai, the latter also being a personal interest that involves frequently getting kicked in the shins (and torso, and head).

UPDATE: A Treasury official got in touch with us after reading this post to explain a little more clearly what happens next.

First a bit of background. Dodd-Frank section 120 authorises the FSOC “to provide for more stringent regulation of a financial activity by issuing recommendations to the primary financial regulatory agencies to apply new or heightened standards and safeguards… if the Council determines that the conduct, scope, nature, size, scale, concentration, or interconnectedness of such activity or practice could create or increase the risk of significant liquidity, credit, or other problems spreading among bank holding companies and nonbank financial companies, financial markets of the United States.” Read more

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

It’s the product of all those Select Committee hearings, including appearances by Messrs. Diamond and Tucker. It is only a preliminary report. But it does not have kind words for the authorities who failed to stop the attempted manipulation of Libor before and during the financial crisis. (Barclays management is of course completely coruscated.) As jaded as we’ve all become by the Libor scandal, it’s pretty damning. Read more

Kate is FT AV’s Asia Correspondent. She joined FT Alphaville in mid-2011 after carrying out various roles in the FT’s London office since 2005: interactive editor, companies reporter, and founding editor of the FT’s Energy Source blog.

HSBC came in for a kicking in the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations into anti-money laundering and exposure of the US financial system to drug and terrorism financing.

Some of this is old news; as the FT notes, HSBC has not been formally accused of wrongdoing in connection with the most recent investigation, but it has twice been ordered by US regulators to take action on deficient anti-money laundering practices. However investigation by the US Department of Justice, the US Treasury and the Manhattan district attorney, is under way into many of the allegations raised in the Senate report, and some analysts expect fines of up to $1bn to result. Read more